Flowers Bloom (7i)—Emile's Bloom V

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Flowers Bloom."

One year ago on Round and Square (17 May 2011)—Introduction to the RSQ series "Middles"

[a] Dénouement RF

I am supposed to give a series of lectures this week on Allan Bloom, the obscure University of Chicago professor who wrote a blockbuster bestseller on education precisely twenty-five years ago. At this time in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind was climbing the New York Times bestseller list. I am going to try a new approach. Instead of posting what I have written (I do a lot of that here on Round and Square already), I am going to post some of what I have been reading in preparation for the lectures. Consider this week's posts—which will appear under various topics on Round and Square, ranging from "Beginnings" and "Flowers Bloom" to "Displays of Authenticity" and "Endings"—as lecture preparation. 

And, just for the record, regular readers probably already know that I will post the actual lectures not long after they have been given. This week's posts focus on the preparation process, and tackling Allan Bloom's arguments should get your blood pumping. Today's text is the last in a week-long series on Bloom and the core texts that shaped his thinking. It comes from the introduction to Bloom's translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's educational and cultural classic, Emile. Today's post has the two-paragraph conclusion (followed by a "note") to Bloom's introductory essay. I could not help but conclude this week-long series on Allan Bloom without giving Bloom the last word.

Shakespeare   Republic1   Republic2   Emile   Emile1   Emile2   Emile3   Emile 4   Emile5

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[b] Flower Champs RF

Allan Bloom gets the last word in this series of posts. It began last week with Shakespeare's Politics and the Republic, then continued with the Emile. I argue that a careful reading of those posts (organized in order at the top and bottom of the page) lays the foundation for understanding the serious thread running through The Closing of the American Mind. Much of that 1987 book—which will be covered in its own right in later posts on Round and Square—is filled with distractions that detract from a serious argument, in my opinion. There are jabs and cheap shots throughout part one in particular that got many progressive knees jerking all over the country. As I have already noted in the introduction to "Flowers Bloom," he couldn't resist the temptation to score points here and there at what I regard as the expense of his larger argument. 

He didn't see it that way. 

The best way to describe Bloom's reaction to such criticism is that he felt he had accomplished both—pummeled the multicultural liberal underbelly and traveled the high road. I would put it a different way. I think that his words in the introductions to his translations of two truly great books—Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Emile—say it all a great deal better. Let's give Bloom a chance to sum it up in the ending to his introductory essay on the Emile. It has all the power that I came to respect in Bloom, even when I didn't agree with him.

Introduction to Rousseau's Emile
Allan Bloom (1979) 

[c] Romanticism RF

Emile might seem to some ridiculous because it proposes a system of education which is manifestly impossible for most men and virtually impossible for any man. But this is to misunderstand the book. It is not an educational manual, any more than Plato's Republic is advice to rulers. Each adopts a convention—the founding of a city or the rearing of a boy—in order to survey the entire human condition. They are books for philosophers and are meant to influence practice only in the sense that those who read them well cannot help but change their general perspectives.

Rousseau intends to show that only his understanding of nature and history can adequately describe what man really is and to caution his contemporaries against simplifying and impoverishing the human phenomena. The very unity of man he appears to believe he has demonstrated reveals the problematic character of any solution to man's dividedness. Emile stands somewhere between the citizen of the Social Contract and the solitary of the Reveries, lacking something of each. And this book was the inspiration for both Kant's idealism and Schiller's romanticism, each of which is somehow an elaboration of one aspect of Rousseau's complex teaching. Whatever else Rousseau may have accomplished, he presented the alternatives available to man most comprehensively and profoundly and articulated them in the form which has dominated discussion since his time. We must study him to know ourselves and to discover possibilities his great rhetoric may have overwhelmed.

Note

Emile was published in 1762, almost simultaneously with the Social Contract and two years after the Nouvelle Heloise. Together these three works constitute an exploration of the consequences for modern man of the tensions between nature and civilization, freedom and society, and hence happiness and progress which Rousseau propounded in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) and the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754). They each experiment with resolutions of the fundamental human problem, the Social Contract dealing with civil society and the citizen, the Nouvelle Heloise with love, marriage, and the family, and Emile with the education of a naturally whole man who is to live in society. They provide Rousseau's positive statement about the highest possibilities of society and the way to live a good life within it. The major works to which he devoted the rest of his life (Confessions, Dialogues, Dreams of a Solitary Walker) were dedicated to meditation on and presentation to mankind of the profoundest kind of soul, his own, the soul capable of revealing the human situation as he did in his earlier writings.

[d] Thinkinvalides RF

Shakespeare   Republic1   Republic2   Emile   Emile1   Emile2   Emile3   Emile 4   Emile5

Notes

[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile [Translated with an introduction by Allan Bloom] (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 28-29.

Bibliography

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile [Translated with an introduction by Allan Bloom]. New York: Basic Books, 1979.